Memo to myopic parents

From: Dr. Koshary;

To: Those parents of students at CBU who seem to believe and declare to their children that paying a lot of money for their children's education automatically entitles them to demand high grades from those students 

• despite the fact that a grade is meant as an evaluation of how well the student learned something new and not of what the student already knew beforehand,
• despite the fact that a liberal arts college is supposed to challenge a student intellectually,
• despite the fact that students sometimes struggle early on to get the hang of a new subject,
• despite the fact that a C is a perfectly normal grade to get in a discipline outside one's intended or declared major,
• despite the fact that one C on a test or paper does not even necessarily mandate a C in the course at large,
• despite the fact that one C on a transcript does not doom a person to a life of abject poverty and misery,
• despite the fact that encouraging them to focus their strongest efforts on their sports and extracurriculars and social networks in legitimized drinking clubs is almost entirely dissonant with the idea of encouraging them to excel in schoolwork,
• despite the fact that this attitude implies that only poor people in inexpensive schools need to work for their grade,

and on that economic basis demand that their children drop a full-credit college course when a C appears a possible outcome

• thereby communicating to their children that 'academic achievement' is really just maintaining a flat-line lack of intellectual growth within a comfort zone,
• thereby communicating to their children that the best course of action to take when presented with a challenge is to quit and shy away from the challenge,
• thereby communicating to their children that those non-scholastic components of the student's schedule are actually more important than the coursework in college,
• thereby communicating to their children that grown-ups in the real world are more worried by a record of struggle for achievement than by a record of weak effort and cowardice,
• thereby communicating to their children that their final transcript will augment rather than weaken their chances in an already-tough post-collegiate job market,
• thereby ultimately communicating to their children that form is more important than content, that price is equivalent to value, and that college is not truly about education;

Body text:  You make me sick.  May you reap what you sow.  (Enjoy having your kids move back in with you when they're 35, saddled with six figures of consumer debt, saying that their jobs were just too hard to keep, given their social schedules.)

Most sincerely,
Dr. Koshary